How to Clean Any Oven

The holiday season is approaching and between Thanksgiving dinner, Christmas cookies, and holiday entertaining, your oven is going to be working overtime. Now is the perfect time to prep your kitchen for the season by cleaning out last year's leftovers from your oven.

Safety first: Make sure you follow the instruction manual for your oven.

Next step: Find out what type of oven you have. Is it self-cleaning, textured, or the traditional non-self-cleaning kind.

Self-Cleaning: Lucky you! All you need to do is turn on the "self-clean" mode and wait. Open up windows to allow the smoke to escape and to prevent it from sticking to your walls. When the cycle finishes any residue will have turned into a pile of ash that is easily cleaned up with a wet rag.

Textured: Another easy clean-up, the textured oven's surface is designed to clean as it cooks. A quick wipedown after each time food spills over is all the cleaning this oven needs. Make sure to use gentle cleaning materials, however, as the special surface is easily scratched.

Non-Self-Cleaning: It's time to break out the oven cleaner and scrubbing brush. Also, baking soda is really good at soaking up grease and oily stains. A good way to avoid this in the future is to cover the bottom with aluminum foil to catch any drippings, just make sure not to block any vents or you could have a fire on your hands.